


Requiem of the Wind

by SEABlRD



Category: Warcraft (2016), Warcraft - All Media Types
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mourning, movie!canon setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-22
Updated: 2016-10-22
Packaged: 2018-08-23 21:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8343952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SEABlRD/pseuds/SEABlRD
Summary: AU Idea #3: I see you every month when I visit my family member at the graveyard and usually you look like you're dealing, but this time you cry and I just have to go and hug you because you look so sad.





	

**Author's Note:**

> my friend sent this photo to me a long time ago and I just remembered it  
>   
> partially inspired by [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JEHt0oRyY8)
> 
> also I'm sorry

There is a big cemetery in Stormwind where the bodies of the brave people who gave their life for the kingdom are laid to rest. There are no separated sections in the cemetery, and all citizens are buried with their family or as close as they could afford to be. Soldiers, nobles, and civilians are buried in the same cemetery because they have the same intrinsic value, in the eyes of the King.

Anduin Lothar can visit both his son and his wife at the same time. He was lucky, he managed to get a plot for Callan close to the resting place of his dear Cally. It’s fitting, Lothar thinks, that he should be with his mother. She will take care of him better than Lothar ever did, wherever they are. 

The graves of Llane and Medivh are side by side, tall and hovering over the other tombstones. Protecting them, even in death. Llane’s tombstone is a large and ornate thing with an inordinately detailed carving of a lion on it, something he would have hated with a passion were he alive, and it brings Lothar a little bit of amusement every time he sees it. Amusement that is followed closely by a pang in his heart. So he’s the last one left of his group of friends. What an unhappy thing to think about.

Khadgar follows Lothar into the cemetery every time he visits his wife, son, and friends, nodding respectfully to the tombstones and sometimes putting little flowers on them. It’s the least the mage could do, for the people who died so that the rest of them could live. Lothar can see him reading the epitaphs, sometimes tearing up and standing by some tombstones for longer than others. It’s become almost a ritual of theirs over the course of the year, Lothar would come to the cemetery to grieve and Khadgar would tag along to keep him grounded, even though he doesn’t know that he does. The quiet sounds the mage makes reminds Lothar that all is not lost yet, that there are still some people alive, there are still some things to fight for. 

Every so often, Khadgar would bump into a headstone or trip over a lump on the ground and he apologizes profusely to the inhabitants of the cemetery closest to him. Lothar told him a while ago that it wasn’t necessary, that the dead don’t care if you make a fool of yourself, but the mage cannot break his habit and he finds himself muttering apologies to them anyway.

Lothar lies down beside Callan and Cally’s tombstones, crossing his arms behind his head and looking at the passing clouds.  Neither he or Khadgar speak, keeping their musings to themselves to avoid disturbing the sleeping dead, and slowly his eyelids drift closed. The commander can hear Khadgar walking around, probably paying his respects to the dead and putting some of his mageroyal on their graves, he thinks. 

The sound of Khadgar’s footsteps stop somewhere farther to Lothar’s left, far longer than he usually stops for. Lothar’s eyes blink open slowly and he strains his neck to look around. He finally catches sight of the mage toward the end of the cemetery, where the tombstones are small and usually of crudely cut and carved rock. Some of them don’t even have names, Lothar remembers, and he think it’s sad that there are people here that may never be remembered by their names, anymore. 

Khadgar is staring down at one of the rough stones with wide eyes and a hand clamped over his mouth. For a moment, Lothar is alarmed and quickly scrambles to his feet. Did Khadgar sense something? Is there danger? 

Until the young man’s shoulders heave violently, then Lothar is scared that he might get sick all over some poor bastard’s grave. The sound of a cracked, aborted sob coming from Khadgar has Lothar panicking for an entirely different reason, and he rushes to the mage’s side just in time to catch him as his knees buckle.

“Bookworm? Khadgar, what’s wrong?” Lothar demands, checking him over for any possible injuries or other sources of pain. Khadgar shakes his head and opens his mouth to reply but all that comes out is another sob, so Lothar asks again. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Khadgar hiccups and gestures toward the headstone he stopped at, unable to form coherent words. Lothar turns to the headstone and reads it. Janie Thornven is crudely scrawled into the stone, which is round and uncut. As though someone just found the biggest rock they could and hand carved the name into it. There are no other indicators as to what may have caused Khadgar to break down like this, so Lothar looks around at the other nearby stones, all of similar make as the first.

Cara Thornven, Hawkrett Thornven, and Ryl Thornven are the names that surround him, and Lothar begins making a connection.

“Khadgar, who are these people?” he asks, holding the mage as he shakes himself to pieces in his arms. He gently lowers Khadgar to the ground and sits beside him, hugging him tightly and rubbing the mage’s back gently as he waits for his crying to subside. 

Eventually, Khadgar has enough of his wits about him to formulate a response. He reaches out to touch the carved stone, lower lip shaking as he exhales. “This… Janie is… she  _ was _ , more like.” Khadgar swallows the lump that threatens to spill out of his throat. “She was my… my baby sister.”

Lothar nods and looks over the surrounding tombstones in a different light. He can’t even begin to imagine how Khadgar must feel, surrounded by a family he never grew up with and finding them…. Like this.

“Hawkrett,” Khadgar sniffles, forcing a smile as he crawls out of Lothar’s grasp to touch the bigger stone. “That was my dad’s name, I knew it had to be them when I saw these.”

Lothar doesn’t want to know this, but he knows that these plots were made for the ones that fell to the first wave of Horde invasions. Before he, and the rest of the Stormwind Army, could help them. Before Khadgar could help them. By the look in Khadgar’s eyes, the mage knows this too. Slowly, the hesitant smile on Khadgar’s lips begins to fall.

“Khadgar-”

“If only I…” Khadgar interrupts, quiet and under his breath. “If I were faster, if I had found the  _ fel  _ sooner…”

“You can’t blame yourself for not knowing, Khadgar.” Lothar says, putting a hand on the mage’s shoulder. “Even if you  _ did _ know, there’s no guarantee you could have helped. One orc is more than enough to raze an entire village, there’s no way you would have been able to stand up to one on your own, let alone a whole party. Not without knowing what you know now.”

“Yeah, I…. yeah.” Khadgar says lamely, his frame slumping and still trembling with afterquakes. 

They stay there, beside the graves of Khadgar’s family, for the better part of an hour. Khadgar tends to the small plots as best as he can, taking out the weeds that grew around them and planting some mageroyal seeds by the tombstones, conjuring a glass to water them. The sun is well past it’s highest point by the time Khadgar decides to stand, jolting Lothar out of his reverie and pulling the man to his feet.

Lothar dusts himself off and looks over at the mage one last time, taking note of the redness of his eyes and the expression on his face that seems to make him so much older than he is. Despite how exhausted from crying he looks, Khadgar is calm and resolute. He looks back to Lothar and nods.

“I didn’t really get to know them, y’know?” he says, and Lothar does know. Given to the Kirin Tor at age six, there’s no way Khadgar could have gotten to know his biological family very well.  “But that’s okay, because I’ll remember them as they were. And they’ll always know me as I was.”

“They’ll know you as you will be, too, you know.” Lothar says with certainty. “I’m sure they’re out there, watching over you. You grew up to be a good man, someone they’d be proud of.”

Khadgar takes a deep breath and sighs, nodding. “Yeah.” he accepts. “I’ll try my best. I’ll take down Gul’dan, get rid of the fel. Maybe we can find peace with the orcs one day, and nobody else will have to die.”

While Lothar would love to grimace at the idea of making friends with orcs, he admits to himself that it’s good to still have some hope. Maybe Khadgar is right, and someday they won’t have to fight the Horde again. That would be a good day, he thinks. 

He pats Khadgar’s back offering a supportive smile. No words are exchanged, but Khadgar smiles back.

On their way back to the castle, Lothar pipes up. “Will you ever tell me about them?” he asks, almost regretting his question. It’s not like he has a right to the mage’s private life and past, anyway.

Khadgar’s steps falter but he recovers rather quickly, which Lothar has to give him credit for. After some thinking, walking in silence for long enough for Lothar to forget he even asked at all, Khadgar replies.

“Someday,” he reassures him. “I’ll tell you everything I remember. Maybe not soon, bot someday.”

And that’s a better answer than Lothar could have asked for. His mouth opens and closes as he tries to say something back, but ultimately he decides it’s better to leave it at that. He holds the door open for Khadgar, when they reach the castle, and Khadgar thanks him quietly as he steps inside.

They part ways, Khadgar to his room and Lothar to the barracks, since they both have some business and different duties to attend to, but they both know they’ll see each other again soon for an outing to the cemetery, as morbid as that sounds. They have people and pasts to visit.

**Author's Note:**

> this is an unedited/unbetad mess and I apologize for that \\(0v0)/ had to find some way to whack my writing block out of my head and this ended up being it  
> it sounds weird to me and probably hits like 30 cliches but i dont care ?? sorry
> 
> blame @RavenZaphara for this thanks


End file.
